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From ACF: A renter’s guide to eco-friendly living

May 28, 2009

I'm a renter and these tips have been useful for me, maybe you could save a little money while saving the Earth by you too following these tips. Thanks to the Australian Conservation Foundation for the originality. If you save save money, why not invest those savings into your footprint of life and participate in our Carbon Offset Projects.

As a renter, it can be disheartening to listen to sustainable renovation stories from home owners, knowing that restrictions of being on a lease prevent structural changes. Bruce Paton, GreenHome project officer, has already entertained the prospect of awkward conversations with his landlord: “What carport? You always had recycled timber decking!”.

Fortunately, there are a lot of things you can do as a renter to make a big difference to your environmental impact.

So what can I do?
What renters can do varies from state to state and is a complicated area, but basically it boils down to this: you are only allowed to change things that don’t involve installing fixtures or making permanent changes that can’t be undone when you leave. In other words, you can’t put in insulation, solar panels or water-saving shower heads without your landlord’s prior written consent.

However, this still leaves a lot of very effective things that you can do to reduce your impact. A good place to start is the ACF Consumption Atlas, an online resource.

This tells you what contribution different activities make to your resource use, and a quick glance reveals that most of these have nothing to do with the structure of your house; food typically contributes about a quarter of your impact, so why not try buying local and cooking meals with less meat in them?

Electricity comes in pretty high too, and this can be addressed at a stroke by signing onto 100% accredited Green Power for just a dollar a day – check out www.greenpower.gov.au for more info.

Pretty soon you’ll find that you are making a big difference without making a dent in your lease arrangements. Remember, most of our environmental impact comes from producing the goods and services we use, and you don’t have to ask your landlord before you change that!

Another good idea is to simply talk to your landlord about what you can do. Most reasonable landlords would be only too happy to receive a proposal that includes the reasons for making a change, the facts and figures backing up your case and the contribution you are prepared to bring to the table (including finance and/or labour). You might well find that they are receptive to your suggestions.

I’m a landlord – what can I do?
If you are a landlord you are allowed to make major structural alterations, so if you want to install water saving shower heads, dual-flush toilets or extra insulation go right ahead. A bonus is that the Federal Government’s new economic stimulus package includes rebates of up to $1000 for landlords that install insulation in their rental properties.

Thank-you for Recycling $7 AUD into Carbon Offset

May 08, 2009

Good Evening from the semi overcast, almost full moon, Fraser Coast! Thank-you to our Member who recycled 7 AUD$ it's 11:13pm on a Friday night and getting up onto my knees in front of this laptop to do the Tropical Forest Calypso Dance has been gracefully reCEIved and most enjoyable consider your Seed Planted after your Carbon Offset ReCycle! Keep watching ODCC TV for our next live Tree, Seed Planting before winter arrives. Should you be reading this in the future after winter, you can always check the Archives and Episodes Here. I should post a blog entry after it's creation? RSS and find out!

At this stage our newest link, again, has not been entered or set-up. You can always Log-In and update, change, modify or delete any of your details at anytime, including where your ReCycled $7 leads to on the World Wide Web! At this stage our newest re-cycler leads back to our Main Page, if for any reason you are having difficulties, remember you can always use our Yahoo! IM Contact Button on our Footer Below. Sometimes we are Online, other times we are Offline (Sleeping, Broadcasting, and other unforseen loss of Internet Access), Or even add me at MySpace?

Thank-you again, and Good Night from FarmerChristian!
Peace be with you!
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